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Attempting to prevent an unprecedented catastrophe, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, and Republican Richard Lugar authored the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, signed into law in 1991. Without a doubt, the CTR program has done some amazing work, deactivating 5,990 nuclear warheads and destroying 479 ballistic missiles, 435 ballistic missile silos, 97 bombers, 336 submarine-launched missiles, 396 submarine missile launchers, and 24 strategic missile submarine. Thanks to CTR, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus are free of nuclear weapons, a fact that comforts Russians more than us, no doubt.

At the time of CTR's inception, Russia was too weak to address proliferation concerns. The CTR program delivered vast sums of money in hard times, which encouraged the Russian government to cooperate. But Russia is a very different country today than it was in 1992, said Ilan Berman, vice-president of the American Foreign Policy Council. "Nunn-Lugar came along at a time in the early 90s when Russia was literally broke," he said. "The monetary situation in Russia is now far less a factor. The Russian economy has bounced back; they are paying off the national debt and even building cash reserves. Still, they are unwilling to increase their investment in disarmament so long as America remains so willing to put up the money regardless of whether the Russians hold up their end of the bargain or not."

This disregard was on display at Shchuchye, an $890 million facility designed to destroy Russian chemical weapons stockpiles to keep the country in compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention, which it signed in 1993. Russia agreed to pony up an additional $750 million for the project, but had only provided $25 million at last count. Meanwhile, local officials are beginning to make rumbles about shutting down the facility on environmental grounds, openly trumpeting the railroading of Votkinsk as a model. Considering the unwillingness of the Putin administration to intervene then, the possibility that Shchuchye could become a billion dollar boondoggle for CTR is not beyond the realm of imagination.

Things are not much better over at Mayak in Russia's Southern Ural mountains, home of the largest nuclear complex on the planet. At Russia's request, CTR built a huge storage facility for dismantled nuclear warheads and plutonium at Mayak. The U.S. government in theory limited CTR funding of the project to $275 million, approximately half the cost. Russia agreed to come up with the other $275 million once the program was under way, but ultimately reneged. With little protest, CTR quickly agreed to put up $385 million to get the site up and running, and as yet has received no firm assurances from the Russian government that it will front the more than $10 million annual operating costs of the facility.

Since 1995, the U.S. has been providing Russia with security equipment for facilities housing WMD, with the understanding that if the U.S. installs it, the Russians will pay to run it. But the Russians have brazenly refused to pay. According to a GAO report, the U.S. has spent $171 million for operational support and development at sites across Russia.

Adding insult to injury, Russia continues to deny American inspectors access to the Mayak facility that American dollars just built, thus making it impossible to know exactly what is being stored there. It is possible, of course, that the Russians are using the facility to store precisely the materials the U.S. built it to store and nothing else. But their unwillingness to allow American inspectors to take a look around reeks of secrecy and deceit. Without verification, everything remains in question. Even the godfather of CTR, Dick Lugar, was barred from visiting a bio-weapons facility on a trip to Russia two years ago, without explanation.

THIS LACK OF TRANSPARENCY is nothing new. An examination of the CTR program by the GAO found that the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy had denied American teams access to 73 percent of buildings with weapons-usable material housed in them. Additionally, Americans have been denied entry into sites where it is believed the Russian government continues an offensive biological weapons program in violation of treaty obligations, including production of such nasty bugs as Ebola and the Marburg virus, pathogens that could kill millions in the wrong hands.

The most outrageous case of lack of transparency has to be the Liquid Propellant Disposition System at Krasnoyarsk, a $106 million facility built by CTR at Russia's request to dispose of 30,000 metric tons of heptyl (liquid fuel) and 123,000 metric tons of amyl or oxidizer. In addition to the plant itself, several million dollars were spent to provide Russia with flatbed railcars, specially designed tank containers, and cranes to help transport the propellant. When all was said and done, and the Americans asked for deliveries to begin, the Russians disclosed that there wasn't any heptyl or amyl to be disposed of -- they had already used the fuel in launches of commercial satellites and a new line of Proton missiles.

A letter to CTR program directors obtained by The American Spectator makes clear that Nikolai Shumkov, deputy director general of the Russian Air and Space Agency, was not in the throes of guilt over this massive deception. Shumkov allows that CTR directors were "justified in claiming that the Russian side should have informed the U.S. side" that the plant would be useless, and goes on to explain that while there is still heptyl to be reprocessed, Russia would be holding on to it "due to an increased number of Proton missile launches in future years." Shumkov closed the letter with suggestions for what to do with the now worthless plant, which basically amounted to gutting the building and selling the parts on the world market.

The U.S. is taking Shumkov's advice and expects to recoup about one million dollars on its $106 million investment. Not once does Shumkov suggest the U.S. should be reimbursed for the huge outlay of cash with the profits Russia made from satellite launches.

CAN C.T.R. BE REFORMED? Yes, but only if a warts-and-all examination of the program, something not possible thus far, is done. A Pentagon investigation into CTR waste earlier this year was too mincing to be useful. The inspector general's report said that the program had derailed because, "positions responsible for CTR oversight were vacant for almost five years" and that there was not "an adequate chain of command between the organizations responsible for implementation and those responsible for oversight." But in fact there has been no loss of continuity -- the same cast of players involved now was present in the mid-1990s.

"We [Russia and the United States] do have common interests to a certain point," says Ilan Berman, vice-president of the American Foreign Policy Council. "But CTR has become a pet project for some in the government, which essentially means its supporters are reluctant to acknowledge mistakes or have a serious discussion about reforming it. So there have been no midcourse corrections, and the program has become a bit sidetracked."

It is not unreasonable to ask, for example, whether the United States and Russia still agree on disarmament goals. An official White House memorandum on CTR notes that the "Secretary of State is unable to certify that the Russian Federation is committed to foregoing any military modernization program that exceeds legitimate defense requirements and foregoing the replacement of destroyed weapons of mass destruction." The memorandum casts doubt on whether the Russians have been honest in their declarations on chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was more blunt in an interview with Jim Lehrer. "Russia is an active proliferator," he said. "They are part of the problem."

Russian politics has changed vastly since the early 1990s. The long-held excuse that Putin was too weak politically to foist a disarmament regime on the Russian military is losing credence in the aftermath of his landslide reelection. The public boasting of Putin and his top officials about Russia's military expansion and capabilities is not the rhetoric of a weak regime.

topics:
Foreign Policy, Vladimir Putin, Environment, Law, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Pakistan, NATO, Nuclear Weapons, Energy